Hey guys, thank you for the replies.
Kroy:
- At this time it is all spinners, but I definitely plan to play with SSDs in the near future
- I actually just pulled the trigger on an Intel RES3TV360 brand-new / open-box for $225 (it is really nice)
- Very much overkill, but I am hoping since this is a current product it will last me a long time
- I also like that I have 48Gig of bandwidth between my HBA and the expander using just one small cable
- Interestingly, the latest firmware even says it supports tri-mode HBAs and RAID controllers
I originally got the 16-port HBA so that I could (hopefully) run the card directly in the QNAP without an expander, because there really isn't room for both of these in there. Unfortunately, the backplane port on the QNAP motherboard, that looks like a PCIe x8 port, is actually just a proprietary connector that looks like one. This leaves me with only one PCIe port, and I wanted to do the HBA and a 10Gig NIC.
So, I purchased a Supermicro X9SCM-F, which can take the same Xeon CPU and ECC RAM that I upgraded the QNAP with for $50, and now with the expander I should be able to turn the QNAP into an external JBOD enclosure. I also purchased a nice Fractal Design case that itself can also take 11x 3.5" and 4x 2.5" drives, so I should be set for drives and ports for quite some time. I even got an EVGA power supply that included a nice adapter to run the power supply without a motherboard. I am currently building this out now with all the cables, adapters, and fans needed to make it all work, which is actually quite allot of stuff. I was thinking it might be worth a follow up to the article on STH about creating your own JBOD that was inspiration for me going down this path. At the very least I can follow up here with some pics when I am done.
It's funny, my intention was to build this out as a backup server to something more powerful that would be the primary, but this backup server is turning into something pretty special in it's own right.
Caplam:
- The QNAP model was a 10-slot TS-1079 Pro (became a ES- model when I put a Xeon and ECC ram in there)
- Two of the ports on the backplane died, and QNAP support said they don't make them anymore so I was completely SOL
- It was a bit of a leap of faith to buy this thing in the first place at $2,800 six years ago
- I was very happy with it, and I still think QNAP's are nice, but after this incident I don't think I would buy one again
- Creating this JBOD out of it's corpse has been kind of fun, so at least I can still get some value out of it
- From here I will stick with things that are more commodity-oriented to that I could still buy spares many years afterward
- In theory, you might still be able to run the QNAP OS on my heavily modified version here, I might try it just for S&G
- However, from here I am going to stick with Storage Spaces or ZFS, I think check-summed data is the way to go forward
- It would be interesting to see if I could run the QNAP inside a VM or something.....
-JCL